The Kitsch State
How Trump turned American politics into mass-produced sentiment—and why liberals keep losing the culture war.
Kristi Noem poses for carefully staged photos at El Salvador's notorious CECOT prison, converting human suffering into political branding. Elon Musk leaps on stage wielding Javier Milei's chainsaw, transforming libertarian revolution into meme-worthy cosplay. Donald Trump signs tariff agreements with a calculated theatrical flair, flanked by American flags and carefully selected props, turning governance itself into reality-TV spectacle.
Each moment engineered primarily for virality rather than substantive policy impact.
This isn't performance art; it's the new face of political power in the digital age.
All of this collapses the boundaries between representation and governance.
This phenomenon has created the Kitsch State, where manufactured sentimentality replaces democratic deliberation, emotional manipulation supplants policy discussion, and aesthetic performance becomes paramount.
Initially, I considered labeling this phenomenon the "Vibe State," highlighting politics' shift toward affect and ambiance over substance. But on second thought there is a more precise and sinister dynamic: kitsch. If vibes are ambient and passive - background mood music - kitsch is actively manipulative, engineered to trigger specific emotional reactions and circumvent reflection.
The Mechanics of Mass Sentimentality
Kitsch has a precise definition that most people get wrong. It's not simply "bad taste" or "mass appeal." Kitsch is mass-produced sentimentality designed to trigger automatic, unreflective emotional responses while denying complexity and contradiction. A Thomas Kinkade painting isn't kitsch because lots of people like it, it's kitsch because it offers pre-digested “beauty” that requires no critical engagement, no confrontation with difficulty or ambiguity.
Milan Kundera described this as kitsch's "denial of shit", its intentional avoidance of life's messiness. In Trump's kitsch, America is always clearly defined: either victorious or victimized, with no nuance allowed. Immigration is either completely safe or an invasion. The economy is either the best ever or totally destroyed. Every issue gets reduced to emotional absolutes.
Political kitsch operates the same way. It manufactures emotions at industrial scale while systematically eliminating the critical distance necessary for democratic judgment. Trump's rallies act as emotional assembly lines, feeding viral clips, memes, and coordinated campaigns online. Each "Let's Go Brandon" chant, each Pepe meme, and every manipulated immigration narrative serves the same purpose: emotional simplicity optimized for algorithmic amplification.
Fact-checking alone struggles against kitsch because rational arguments can't effectively counter emotionally charged memes. Trumpian content thrives on emotional immediacy, amplified algorithmically to mask and block measured discourse.
Historical Context and Contemporary Innovation
Clement Greenberg warned in 1939 that kitsch appealed to totalitarian regimes due to its emotional accessibility. 1933 Germany, for example, created totalizing aesthetic environments suppressing critical thought entirely.
Hermann Broch identified the crucial mechanism: kitsch "operates through imitation rather than ethics," creating "fake art that expresses fake emotions".
The fakeness isn't a bug—it's a feature. Artificial emotions are easier to control than genuine ones because they can be mass-produced, distributed, and modified according to political needs.
Trump's innovation adapts kitsch to democratic contexts. He doesn't abolish elections; he renders them emotionally driven experiences, diminishing rational voter engagement. Unlike Germany’s kitsch's pseudo-sophisticated aesthetic, such as Wagner or classical architectural imitation, Trump's populist kitsch proudly embraces lowbrow culture. He serves fast food to sports teams at White House receptions, plays Broadway musical hits at rallies, and leans into wrestling-style spectacle. This deliberate rejection of "elite" cultural markers strategically cultivates perceived authenticity among supporters.
A Global Trend
Trump isn't alone. Javier Milei performs libertarian cosplay for young Argentine voters online. Nayib Bukele in El Salvador deploys drone-shot, cinematic propaganda resembling video-game marketing. India's Narendra Modi orchestrates Bollywood-style political rallies amplified through WhatsApp and digital memes. Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil similarly harnessed social media-driven emotional manipulation to govern through simplified sentimentality.
Populist kitsch intentionally rejects high-culture complexity, yet faces a legitimacy problem: how do you claim civilizational authority while rejecting its institutions? One of the solutions is cultural piracy and appropriation. Conservative intellectuals now claim Moby Dick, the show “Girls” or Homer as right-wing art & culture, appropriate Roman statuary for "Bronze Age mindset" aesthetics, and invoke classical architecture while defunding arts education. They want cultural tradition's emotional weight without its complexity.
This intellectual dishonesty reveals deeper insecurity—they desperately need cultural legitimacy but can't create it organically, so they steal it from traditions that would reject them. The appropriation strategy forces liberals into defensive positions, spending energy protecting old interpretations instead of building new cultural forms with mass appeal.
The Liberal Response Problem
Most liberal criticism treats Trump as either a policy failure (he's not primarily about policy) or a norm violation (he's creating new norms). The assumption is that better information, fact-checking, or institutional procedures will restore democratic discourse.
It treats Trump as a political problem requiring political solutions, when Trump is actually - or also - an aesthetic problem requiring aesthetic solutions.
But you can't fight manufactured emotion with better facts.
The emotional response is the entire product.
Liberal responses often fail because they misunderstand the battlefield. Art may not be the primary cultural battleground anymore. Political influence now flows through podcasts, social media, and entertainment rather than traditional cultural forms.
The deeper issue is the venue problem. Liberals create genuinely powerful emotional experiences: Arthur Jafa's video installations, Jordan Peele's horror films, Hamilton's hip-hop founding fathers, but for audiences that already have cultural capital and political alignment. Meanwhile, Trump delivers immediate emotional catharsis through Joe Rogan's three-hour conversations, memes that reach millions instantly, and rally footage optimized for social media virality. He's building bigger digital churches while liberals create museum pieces.
This structural mismatch explains why treating Trump purely as a policy failure or norm violation misses the deeper aesthetic dimension. You can't counter a viral meme with a policy paper, or defeat emotional spectacle with constitutional arguments.
Strategic Responses: Emotional Authenticity vs. Manufactured Sentiment
Addressing this crisis requires embracing emotion without abandoning reason. The crucial distinction is between democratic emotional work that opens critical faculties versus authoritarian manipulation that closes them. The civil rights movement created massive emotional experiences through music, speeches, and imagery that inspired rather than manipulated, building solidarity while preserving individual judgment.
Digital kitsch systematically eliminates critical distance, the psychological space necessary for reflection and democratic judgment. When every meme, video, and post is optimized for immediate emotional response and algorithmic engagement, the mental muscles required for complex thinking atrophy. Platform architecture itself becomes anti-democratic.
Effective counter-strategies must create emotionally powerful content that competes algorithmically while building rather than depleting critical capacity. This means viral campaigns that cultivate genuine online communities rather than just engagement metrics, political content that feels native to entertainment platforms rather than educational.
One possible and promising strategy is Susan Sontag's notion of "camp", engaging spectacle with irony and humor. Unlike kitsch, camp doesn't demand belief. It loves the performance while keeping a critical distance.
Instead of solemn warnings about democratic norms, camp would produce spectacular counter-performances that reveal the absurdity of the original. Instead of fact-checking Trump, camp would create even more outrageous lies that expose his technique.
TikTok creators who hijack right-wing hashtags to flood them with absurdist or ironic content illustrate this potential. K-pop fans flooded #WhiteLivesMatter and #MAGA with Korean pop videos, drowning out white supremacist messaging during 2020 protests. They also crashed Dallas Police's surveillance app by spamming it with fan videos when police requested protest footage. On TikTok, users hijack brand hashtags with irrelevant content—such as viral raccoon videos or other unrelated memes, hoping to game the algorithm for viral reach, and displace the original intent of the tag. It doesn't "correct" misinformation in a rational sense, it sabotages its virality by corrupting the signal.
Such content can mimic the format and intensity of populist kitsch while disrupting its emotional machinery from within. However, relying solely on camp risks cynicism or accidental amplification of problematic content. Irony can collapse into detachment, and even parody can feed the very narratives it aims to critique.
Sustainability and Democratic Temporality
We're not choosing between political parties—we're choosing between critical citizenship and emotional consumption, between the hard work of shared judgment and the easy pleasure of manufactured sentiment. That choice will determine whether governance retains any democratic meaning.
The Kitsch State represents a fundamental transformation in political power, prioritizing emotional manipulation over persuasion, aesthetic spectacle over institutional governance, and political consumers over engaged citizens.
So, The hardest question is whether it's possible to create mass emotional experiences that serve democratic rather than authoritarian ends. Kitsch works precisely because it eliminates the complexity and ambiguity that democratic citizenship requires. It offers simple answers, clear enemies, and immediate gratification. Democracy offers difficult choices, persistent uncertainty, and delayed rewards.
Can you make democracy feel as good as authoritarianism without making it authoritarian? Can you create emotional unity without eliminating intellectual diversity? Can you build mass movements while preserving individual judgment?
Our choice isn't just about who governs; it's about preserving the possibility of governance grounded in democratic deliberation rather than mere emotional consumption.